Author: azeeadmin

The number of complaints filed with the UK data protection watchdog has more than doubled since the introduction of new European regulations.

There were 6,281 complaints filed with the Information Commissioner’s Office between May 25 when the new GDPR rules went into effect and July 3, a rise of more than double from the 2,417 complaints during the same period a year earlier.

The ICO, which enforces the new rules in the UK, did not say if the bulk of the new cases are GDPR related as the watchdog doesn’t separate out its complaints by type, but said that the agency expects the figures will continue to climb.

“Generally, as anticipated, we have seen a rise in personal data breach reports from organizations,” said an ICO spokesperson. “Complaints relating to data protection issues are also up and, as more people become aware of their individual rights, we are expecting the number of complaints to the ICO to increase too.”

It follows a similar reported rise in figures from neighboring Ireland, with over half of new complaints falling under the GDPR umbrella since the law was introduced.

The new EU-wide rules replace long overdue and fragmented data protection and privacy rules across the 28 member state bloc from two decades ago. Under the new regulations, European citizens can request their data from companies, and can ask for their data to be corrected and deleted under the so-called “right to be forgotten” provision.

Companies that fail to abide by the new rules can face steep fines.

Under the new GDPR regulations, each fine is capped to about €20 million (£16.5m) or four percent of global annual revenue. Previously, the maximum fine was set at £500,000 — a drop in the ocean to some major companies.

Law firm EMW obtained the figures following a Freedom of Information request.

“Despite this being on the horizon for a couple of years, the reality of the work involved in implementation and ongoing compliance may have taken many businesses by surprise,” said James Geary, principal at EMW. “Failing to respond promptly to subject access requests or right to be forgotten requests could result in a fine and the time involved in responding properly should not be underestimated.”

“The more data a business has, the harder it is to respond quickly and in the correct compliant manner,” he said.

What do you do if you’re a European startup competing against the likes of Box and Dropbox, and are looking to make a splash in international markets like the U.S.?

Well, if you’re the Dutch startup WeTransfer (which raised a cool $25 million about three years ago to take the U.S. market by storm), you get weird. Really, really, avant garde-level weird.

The latest overture to the hipsterati is the company’s three video set collaboration with King Krule (which I applaud for no other reason then it lets me write about King Krule on the site).

Here’s the first video from the collaboration between the (Beyonce-and-Tyler-the-Creator-and-New-Yorker-approved) artist and the file transfer and storage service.

The King Krule collab isn’t the first time that WeTransfer looked to cash in on some cultural cache. The company has teamed up with McSweeney’s on a story collaboration called “Clean” written by Shelly Oria and Alice Sola Kim.

Whether or not these forays into the world of the Kool Kidz are the result of a shift in strategy brought on by the company’s relatively new chief executive, Gordon Willoughby (formerly of Amazon), they’re pretty great. (At least, in the sense that we’re writing about WeTransfer for the first time in a few years.)

I can’t say whether WeTransfer’s file sharing service is notably better or worse than Box or DropBox, but their hipster cred is undeniable. Points to you, WeTransfer. Points to you.

Shoes of Prey, a Khosla Ventures-backed shoe retailer whose website let women customize footwear purchases by selecting the color and material of the sandals or pumps they wanted to order as well as the size, has announced it’s stopped taking orders after almost ten years trading.

The management team will now decide whether to sell or otherwise pivot the business.

Founder Jodie Fox announced the shut down in an Instagram post in which she writes about the struggles to scale the company’s early profitability.

“We tested many channels to scale what we had created. From award-winning physical stores, to wholesaling, and of course our direct to customer online experience,” she writes. “While all the indicators and data were positive, we were not able to truly crack mass-market adoption.”

“We are making the difficult decision today to pause orders and actively assess all our options to either sell, or at a later date, reboot the business with substantial changes,” she adds.

“We will cease normal trading as we go through this process. Our customers with outstanding orders will either receive their shoes as promised, or a full refund if we have been unable to make their shoes before this pause.”

A note on the company’s website also reads: “When we started Shoes of Prey back in 2009, we couldn’t have dreamed that we would have the opportunity to share in such an incredible adventure. And you were the most wonderful people to have that adventure with. Today we’re pausing to consider our options for the future of our business, and we have stopped taking orders. We have reviewed all of our orders and if we see that we are unable to make your shoes, you will be fully refunded.”

Customers with questions or queries are asked to email help@shoesofprey.com

Fox does not specify how many customers Shoes of Prey had been able to attract over its near decade run, starting in Australia and later moving its headquarters to LA — beyond referring to “millions of women around the world who have designed shoes with us”.

The company had shown signs of trouble this year, with the Sydney Morning Herald reporting it secured a small bridge round in March at terms which that were said to be “significantly lower” than its previous round of funding (it raised $15.5M in 2015).

In an email to investors at the time, CEO Michael Fox said the bridge round would be used to keep operations afloat and help it seek a new business model.

“Over the last 2 years we’ve made very good progress with our manufacturing capability however we’ve struggled to grow at the rates we’d forecast,” he wrote. “The terms are significantly lower than our last round of funding, but with no alternatives other than winding up the company our board today resolved to recommend this offer to shareholders.”

Last month it also emerged that Shoes of Prey investor Blue Sky had cut the value of its investment in the startup by 12%.

According to Crunchbase the custom footwear retailer had raised a total of $25.9M since 2009.

The latest Echo devices are a touch more premium than their predecessors, but Amazon hasn’t gone out of its way to compete with Apple’s HomePod head-on. And why bother, really, when hardware partners are willing to do the heavy lifting?

Bose is certainly making a compelling case with the Home Speaker 500. The compact smart speaker finds the audio company going all in on the smart assistant market, along with a pair of new soundbars that also sport Alexa functionality.

The company has cautiously embraced Amazon’s smart assistant in recent years, but the trio of new products are the first Bose speakers to feature Alexa built-in, rather than relying on a skill. The Home Speaker is a fairly compact device, measuring 8 x 6 x 4 inches, with two custom drivers built-in, designed to reflect sound off of walls. The looks are a little lacking, but the sound is really what counts. 

There are eight microphones on board that support Amazon’s far-field tech, which means it should play nicely with other Echo devices. Those mics, along with the ones of the soundbars, are built from the same tech found on the company’s headsets.

The smart speaker runs $400, and the soundbars are $550 and $800. All will hit the market in October. Support for other smart assistants is forthcoming (including, one assumes, Google Assistant), with AirPlay 2 functionality arriving early next year.

Xage, the company that wants to help make infrastructure more secure using the blockchain, announced a new policy manager tool to help protect utilities and other critical infrastructure from hackers and automate regulatory compliance.

Xage CEO Duncan Greatwood says the product is partly to fill in a need in the product portfolio, but also is designed to help customers comply with a new wave of regulations coming out of the Department of Homeland Security designed to protect the electricity grid from hacking, particularly from a hostile nation-state.

Greatwood says the government previously was only worried about the core network assets, but over time, it has become clear that hackers have been looking to attack technology on the edge of the utilities network like substations and local control centers, even as granular as sensors and voltage controllers.

The New York Times reported earlier this year that Russian hackers had been targeting the U.S. electrical grid, which is a big reason DHS has been pushing the utilities to upgrade the way they handle password rotation and control remote access, among other things.

This is a big scale problem because you could be talking about a single utility having between 10,000 and 20,000 substations with each of those having hundreds of components inside them. With the new DHS regulations going into effect next year, companies have to start thinking about how to implement them now.

“Between now and the end of next year, utilities are going to have to have a way of automating that system,” Greatwood explained. Xage provides way to set policy to comply with the new set of U.S. government regulations, and then enforce it on the blockchain, ensuring that it hasn’t been tampered with.

Xage Policy Manager. Screenshot: Xage

Part of the problem is that end users have devices like laptops, tablets and smartphones, that they are using to access the network. Xage’s policy management tool can provide clear definitions of who can access the system on what device, helping to block out hackers.

“Part of our data policy management is to define rules around who is allowed to get access and from what machines. Not all laptops will be allowed onto network,” he said. It will require an approved MAC address with an approved fingerprint and a certificate installed from an appropriate department to ensure it is the machine it purports to be.

The blockchain helps ensure that if (or when) a bad actor does penetrate the system, they won’t be able to move freely throughout the network. “If something does go wrong, then it is localized. If you have a bad acting node in the blockchain, it’s detected and you can lock down that sector. It makes it much more difficult to spread the software across entire grid or region,” he said.

Amazon today publicly launched a new perk for Prime members with young children, with the broad release of the new subscription-based “Prime Book Box” service. The $22.99 per box offering ships Prime members in the U.S. a curated selection of kids’ books every 1, 2 or 3 months, at up to 35% off the list price, Amazon says. The service was first launched in May, but was only available in an invite-only basis at that time.

Members will receive 2 hardcover books or 4 board books per box, depending on the child’s age.

The books chosen are curated by Amazon editors and include a combination of new releases, classics and “hidden gems,” and are tailored to the reader’s age range of “Baby-2,” “3-5,” “6-8,” or “9-12.” For example, some current selections include Amazing Airplanes, Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!, Malala’s Magic Pencil, and Nevermoor. 

However, parents can log on to the Book Box site and preview their selections before the box ships, then customize the list as they choose. This would make sense for families with an existing book collection – because their child is older, an avid reader, or because they have hand-me-down books from other children.

If they’re new parents just starting their book collection, they may instead opt to just wait for their shipment, and have the books be a surprise.

The Book Box FAQ also noted that Amazon will use members’ recent purchase history on its site to make sure the box doesn’t include any books the customer had already purchased.

“As a mom who’s spent over 20 years reading and reviewing children’s books, the best part of my job is sharing a love of reading with kids and their families,” said Seira Wilson, Senior Editor, Amazon Books, in a statement about the launch. “Over the past few months, it’s been both exciting and rewarding to hear that Prime Book Box is encouraging kids to spend more time reading. Now that Prime Book Box is available to all U.S. Prime members, I hope we can inspire even more children to discover a love of reading that will last a lifetime.”

The Book Box service is another way for Amazon to retain Prime members – especially the valuable memberships from heads of U.S. households, who are likely to spend more on the retailer’s e-commerce site, as they have more people using the Prime membership.

And, as TechCrunch previously noted, the service will also help Amazon to build a reading profile for the family’s younger members, which can help it to improve its recommendations across the board.

It’s worth pointing out, too, that physical book subscription startups aimed at children have tried and failed to make such a service work, in the past. For example, Sproutkin, The Little Book Club, and Zoobean, are no more.

The challenge for some of these startups was bringing the cost down – something Amazon appears to have managed through its existing publisher relationships. But even in the case of those startups that had offered more affordable plans, they simply didn’t have the reach that Amazon does.

The timing for the startups may have been off, as well – they arrived at a time before we had fully embraced the idea of subscriptions for everything. Today, it’s commonplace.

Plus, Amazon also allows members to control the pace of the shipments further – you don’t have to pay monthly, which can help to attract the more budget-minded shoppers.

Book Box is now one of many subscription boxes Amazon offers. Others include Candy Club, beauty and skin care boxes, STEM Club Toys, and Carnivore Club. It also sells a variety of sample boxes to introduce brands to shoppers.

The service is open today for U.S. Prime members.

A senator has confirmed that the use of cell site simulators for conducting real-time surveillance on cell phones may interfere with 911 calls.

In a letter to the attorney general, Sen. Ron Wyden said that devices, widely known as “stingrays,” can jam cell phones from sending or receiving phone calls and text messages, which may limit a phone from contacting the emergency services. Wyden said officials at Harris, which develops the surveillance device, told his office that a feature designed to prevent interference with 911 calls was neither tested nor confirmed to work.

Wyden said that not only do stingrays disrupt the communications of a targeted cell phone, other people’s devices nearby might also “experience a temporary disruption of service.”

Stingrays are controversial bits of tech — largely in part because almost nobody outside law enforcement has seen one or knows exactly how they work. These devices are held as a closely guarded secret by police and federal agencies who are bound by non-disclosure agreements — so much so that prosecutors have dropped court cases that might reveal confidential information about the devices.

What we do know is that police across the US use these suitcase-sized devices to mimic cell towers, which trick nearby cell phones into connecting to the device. Police can then identify someone’s real-time location and log all the phones within its range.

Some advanced devices are believed to be able to intercept calls and text messages.

Busting through the secrecy has become a challenge for hobbyists and hackers alike. As far back as 2015, researchers were building low-cost alternatives to cell site simulators as proof of concepts. Nowadays, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, cell site simulators are “easy to acquire or build, with homemade devices costing less than $1,000 in parts.”

That’s going to become a problem for regulators and the authorities — if it’s not already a nationals security problem. Although cell site simulators are only available for purchase to law enforcement, Homeland Security recently warned that foreign spies have also obtained the technology — and are using the devices in the nation’s capital.

The EFF said that the “only way to stop the public safety and public privacy threats that cell-site simulators pose is to increase the security of our mobile communications infrastructure at every layer.”

“All companies involved in mobile communications from the network layer [cell carriers] to the hardware layer (chip and networking device makers], to the software layer [tech giants] need to work together to ensure that our cellular infrastructure is safe, secure, and private from attacks by spies, criminals, and rogue law enforcement,” said the rights group.

A fund affiliated with the Singaporean government has a great interest in making sure that American consumers are getting the tech support they need.

Temasek, the multi-billion dollar investment fund associated with the government in Singapore, has led a $50 million round for Puls Technologies, Inc., a San Francisco-based company aiming to be the tech support for American homes and offices.

Current investors Sequoia Capital, Red Dot Capital Partners, Samsung NEXT and Viola Ventures all participated in the new financing as well alongside additional new investors Hanaco Ventures and Hamilton Lane.

Founded only three years ago, Puls pitches a service that can match consumers with the appropriate technician in a little over an hour, any day of the week.

The company has built a network of 2,500 technicians in the top 50 cities in the United States, and will provide same-day installation and repair of over 200 products.

Some things the company’s technicians can service include smartphones, televisions, antennas, garage door openers, and smart home devices like voice-activated speakers, video doorbells, keyless locks, AI cameras, thermostats and security systems.

It’s the full circle of consumer electronics crap.

“As consumers depend on electronic devices for every aspect of daily life, the world needs a new service model,” said Eyal Ronen, Puls co-founder and CEO, in a statement. “No one should have to drive across town and stand in line to speak to an expert, or wait hours at home for a local repair van to show up.”

With the new funding, the company said it’s poised to take a large chunk of the $50 billion in home automation services around the world. By the end of 2018, the company predicts that there will be 11 billion connected devices globally (although that statistic likely includes connected equipment in factories and other technologies related to the internet of things that may not have a place in the home).

The company’s projections are also based on a forecast that predicts an average household will have 50 connected devices (to which I can only say… bless their hearts).

“We’re delighted to have Temasek leading this round,” said Ronen in a statement. “As investors in global online leaders, Temasek brings incredible expertise to our board. It’s a huge vote of confidence in our vision, team and execution, as we accelerate our direct-to-consumer business and expand strategic partnerships with big name retailers, insurance companies, and hardware OEMs.”

Puls raised a $25 million round last year as it completed its rebrand from the cell phone servicing business it had been running under the Cell Savers brand.

“You can’t hack what isn’t there,” Very Good Security co-founder Mahmoud Abdelkader tells me. His startup assumes the liability of storing sensitive data for other companies, substituting dummy credit card or Social Security numbers for the real ones. Then when the data needs to be moved or operated on, VGS injects the original info without clients having to change their code.

It’s essentially a data bank that allows businesses to stop storing confidential info under their unsecured mattress. Or you could think of it as Amazon Web Services for data instead of servers. Given all the high-profile breaches of late, it’s clear that many companies can’t be trusted to house sensitive data. Andreessen Horowitz is betting that they’d rather leave it to an expert.

That’s why the famous venture firm is leading an $8.5 million Series A for VGS, and its partner Alex Rampell is joining the board. The round also includes NYCA, Vertex Ventures, Slow Ventures and PayPal mafioso Max Levchin. The cash builds on VGS’ $1.4 million seed round, and will pay for its first big marketing initiative and more salespeople.

“Hey! Stop doing this yourself!,” Abdelkader asserts. “Put it on VGS and we’ll let you operate on your data as if you possess it with none of the liability.” While no data is ever 100 percent unhackable, putting it in VGS’ meticulously secured vaults means clients don’t have to become security geniuses themselves and instead can focus on what’s unique to their business.

“Privacy is a part of the UN Declaration of Human Rights. We should be able to build innovative applications without sacrificing our privacy and security,” says Abdelkader. He got his start in the industry by reverse-engineering games like StarCraft to build cheats and trainer software. But after studying discrete mathematics, cryptology and number theory, he craved a headier challenge.

Abdelkader co-founded Y Combinator-backed payment system Balanced in 2010, which also raised cash from Andreessen. But out-muscled by Stripe, Balanced shut down in 2015. While transitioning customers over to fellow YC alumni Stripe, Balanced received interest from other companies wanting it to store their data so they could be PCI-compliant.

Very Good Security co-founder and CEO Mahmoud Abdelkader

Now Abdelkader and his VP from Balanced, Marshall Jones, have returned with VGS to sell that as a service. It’s targeting startups that handle data like payment card information, Social Security numbers and medical info, though eventually it could invade the larger enterprise market. It can quickly help these clients achieve compliance certifications for PCI, SOC2, EI3PA, HIPAA and other standards.

VGS’ innovation comes in replacing this data with “format preserving aliases” that are privacy safe. “Your app code doesn’t know the difference between this and actually sensitive data,” Abdelkader explains. In 30 minutes of integration, apps can be reworked to route traffic through VGS without ever talking to a salesperson. VGS locks up the real strings and sends the aliases to you instead, then intercepts those aliases and swaps them with the originals when necessary.

“We don’t actually see your data that you vault on VGS,” Abdelkader tells me. “It’s basically modeled after prison. The valuables are stored in isolation.” That means a business’ differentiator is their business logic, not the way they store data.

For example, fintech startup LendUp works with VGS to issue virtual credit card numbers that are replaced with fake numbers in LendUp’s databases. That way if it’s hacked, users’ don’t get their cards stolen. But when those card numbers are sent to a processor to actually make a payment, the real card numbers are subbed in last-minute.

VGS charges per data record and operation, with the first 500 records and 100,000 sensitive API calls free; $20 a month gets clients double that, and then they pay 4 cent per record and 2 cents per operation. VGS provides access to insurance too, working with a variety of underwriters. It starts with $1 million policies that can be much larger for Fortune 500s and other big companies, which might want $20 million per incident.

Obviously, VGS has to be obsessive about its own security. A breach of its vaults could kill its brand. “I don’t sleep. I worry I’ll miss something. Are we a giant honey pot?,” Abdelkader wonders. “We’ve invested a significant amount of our money into 24/7 monitoring for intrusions.”

Beyond the threat of hackers, VGS also has to battle with others picking away at part of its stack or trying to compete with the whole, like TokenEx, HP’s Voltage, Thales’ Vormetric, Oracle and more. But it’s do-it-yourself security that’s the status quo and what VGS is really trying to disrupt.

But VGS has a big accruing advantage. Each time it works with a clients’ partners like Experian or TransUnion for a company working with credit checks, it already has a relationship with them the next time another clients has to connect with these partners. Abdelkader hopes that, “Effectively, we become a standard of data security and privacy. All the institutions will just say ‘why don’t you use VGS?'”

That standard only works if it’s constantly evolving to win the cat-and-mouse game versus attackers. While a company is worrying about the particular value it adds to the world, these intelligent human adversaries can find a weak link in their security — costing them a fortune and ruining their relationships. “I’m selling trust,” Abdelkader concludes. That peace of mind is often worth the price.

Spotinst, the startup that helps companies purchase and manage excess cloud infrastructure capacity, announced a hefty $35 million Series B today led by Highland Capital.

Existing investors Leaders Fund, Intel Capital and Vertex Ventures also participated. Today’s round brings the total investment to over $52 million.

Cloud infrastructure vendors like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform run massive data centers to have enough capacity at any given moment to respond to customer demand. That means there are always going to be some machines sitting idle. To make use of this excess capacity, the vendors offer deep discounts of up to 80 percent, but there’s a catch.

If the vendor needs that virtual machine at any given moment, the discount customers are going to get kicked off. That leaves developers wary of putting anything critical on the discounted servers, no matter how much they are saving.

That’s where Spotinst comes in. “With machine learning and artificial intelligence, Spotinst can predict trends of availability. We know how long an instance will live and we can smoothly move our customers from one instance to another, allowing them to run complex or mission critical applications,” Spotinst co-founder and CEO Amiram Shachar told TechCrunch.

He sees the two trends of developers moving toward serverless and containerization really helping to drive his business growth. The company announced support for Lambda, AWS’s serverless product, last fall and they are also seeing a big rise in the use of containers. “What we’ve seen in the past six months is that our containers offering is growing exponentially month over month. And as customers are deploying containers we’re able to run them on excess capacity, and save them huge amounts of money,” he explained.

Spotinst management console. Screenshot: Spotinst.

Shachar is clear that they are not offering a brokerage service here. Instead, his customers sign up for Spotinst as a cloud service, and his company makes money by taking a percentage of the money customers save by using this spot capacity.

The company began by working with AWS spot instances, but has since expanded its market to include Google and Microsoft extra capacity as well. In the future, depending on their requirements, customers could potentially move across clouds seamlessly if they wish, moving to wherever the best available price is at any given moment, using Spotinst to manage the transitions. While that’s not something they offer now, it is on the roadmap, he says.

It’s worth noting that just yesterday, VMware bought CloudHealth Technologies, a company that helps customers manage a multi-cloud environment from a single console. Shachar acknowledges that a company like his could be also be an attractive target for a large company, but he and his co-founders are only looking toward building the business and continuing to improve the product.

The company currently has 100 employees, but with the additional investment, Shachar expects to double that in the next year between their U.S. office in San Francisco and their engineering office in Tel Aviv.